Fossil Eyes Reveal Predator's Sharp Vision

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Ancient animals saw the world through multi-faceted compound
eyes, a new fossil discovery reveals. The ancient eyes, which
date back half a billion years, probably belonged to a predator,
likely a giant shrimp-like creature.

Like a modern fly, the ancient creature relied on compound eyes
consisting of thousands of separate lenses to see the world. Each
lens provides a pixel of vision. The more lenses, the better the
creature could see. The mysterious ancient shrimp saw better than
any other animal yet discovered from its era: Its eyes
contained 3,000 lenses.

The fossil eyes were found by Australian researchers on Kangaroo
Island, South Australia. They're 515 million years old, meaning
the animal lived just after the "Cambrian Explosion," a sudden
burst of life and diversity that began 540 million years ago.

"The new fossils reveal that some of the earliest arthropods had
already acquired visual systems similar to those of living forms,
underscoring the speed and magnitude of the evolutionary
innovation that occured during the Cambrian Explosion," the
authors wrote in the Nature article.

Other animals from this timeframe had a mere 100 pixels of
vision, the researchers reported today (June 29) in the journal
Nature. With 3,000 pixels, the newly discovered ancient animals
would have seen three times better than the modern horseshoe
crab. But its eyesight would have paled in comparison to the
modern dragonfly, which has 28,000 lenses in each eye.